What they say: Songs of a Lost World feels at times like David Bowie’s own great reflection on mortality, Blackstar, although the Cure take few of the stylistic risks that he did. Much as in Bowie’s later years, it has often felt like a new Cure album would never arrive, the band’s momentum fatally stalled by the indecision of the 2000s. But perhaps the greatest compliment to pay Songs of a Lost World is that it already feels inevitable, a work of wisdom and grace that extends naturally from the moment the Cure took up their instruments in a local church hall all those years ago. - Pitchfork

What we say: This is the album that we’ve been waiting for since the promise shown in 1999’s “Bloodflowers” of a darker, more focused The Cure. A brief album for the band, coming in at just under 50 minutes, its composite songs variously find Smith and the band exploring mourning, the passing of time and mortality. Like “Disintegration”, it bears a single mood, that of a kind of fraught, depressive, majestic grandeur. Matching the lyrical themes, the instrumentation of “Songs of a Lost World”, is more direct and purposeful than much of their discography, delivered in tracks that move forward with gradual and inevitable bruising impact. We can only pray that the choice of title isn’t clairvoyant. - Jefferson